Innovation is Not a Luxury

Yesterday I participated in a drive-thru food drive for the local homeless shelter here in Valpo. I don’t mention this to make myself sound like a good person - because I’m really not - but to note that we’re barreling toward some terrible economic times and people are going to need a lot of help with basic necessities. It seemed like conventional wisdom was that the economy was really strong, but for some reason two missed paychecks resulted in miles long lines at food banks. I dropped Econ 101 TWICE in college so maybe someone smarter than me can explain it.

(Note: please don’t take this as an invitation to comment or email me with an explanation. I actually don’t care.)

Then I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on my deck and wondering about my own financial future. I don’t really follow Legal twitter (which is the electronic version of a water cooler or cocktail party) so I don’t know a lot of what’s happening to people, but I’ve seen enough posts on LinkedIn of people in the legal/Legal Tech industry announcing that they’re looking for work or stories of layoffs to make me convinced that no one is safe or should be 100% free from worry about their employment stability.

I guess it’s safe to say my professional niche is legal technology and innovation. I mean, I know how to do lots of stuff including flint knapping and six different ways of preserving hides, only four of which require your own urine, so my anthropology degree was very worthwhile is what I’m trying to say. But the most marketable and likely to lead to a paycheck and health insurance is the Legal Tech stuff. Unless civilization really bottoms out then the flint knapping moves up in the rankings.

So there I sat, pondering my fate and watching the local Tom Turkey put on a show for the ladies and otherwise looking like a living Thanksgiving centerpiece.

It seems like for most of my professional career, both in libraries and academia and then later in the more straight legal world, using the word “innovation” in annual reports and strategic plans was done by organizations and individuals in much the same way Mr Tom shows off his feathers.

There hasn’t been a ton of success stories or widespread acceptance, really, that “innovation as a mindset” should be the baseline standard of operation. I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. For one, and this is based on some pop psychology thing I read a while ago, but apparently when you are starting a diet or a running program or something like that, you shouldn’t tell anyone because your brain gets the same endorphin rush from that as it would from completing the task. So I think an organization, for example, hires an “emerging technology librarian” and thinks “Okay, we’re innovative. Good job, us!” and stop there without doing the actual work of planning and supporting that initiative.

Many many times over the past decade I have thought of this cartoon.

Innovation and/or technology adoption is WORK and a long process and not something an organization or person can will or brand into existence. It’s also not something that should be corralled into a little safe space that the rest of the organization can ignore.

I think another problem is that much of the early talk about innovation in the legal sphere came from academics like William Henderson of Indiana and Dan Katz originally at MSU and now at Chicago-Kent. Which is not to say that it wasn’t happening in practice - Mark Cohen of Clearspire and the team at Seyfarth Shaw (especially Lisa Damon and Kim Craig) as well as the wrecking ball that is LegalZoom immediately come to mind - just that things like Katz’s ReInvent Law conferences (planned in conjunction with his professional partner Renee Knake) and Henderson’s writings really pushed the conversation to where it is now over the past 8 years or so.

(I would be remiss if I didn’t somehow fit a mention of Ron Staudt in here somewhere, although his work was mainly in the A2J realm and speaking as someone who has spent most of her career in the A2J world, people don’t seem to think that…counts. More about that later…)

So anyway, there was a not insignificant amount of push back against the ideas of innovation because they came from people “with no real experience.” I mean, I get that. But there’s a difference between some tech guy parachuting in from the Silicon Valley with absolutely no connection to the subject matter at hand telling you that all your problems will be solved if you just use blockchain and a law professor who’s able to take the time to look at data and 10,000 foot view of the universe and see where things could be improved.

I just realized that I forgot to mention Richard Susskind earlier as one of the conversation drivers in legal innovation. He not only has a Oxford PhD but is also British so he speaks with that fancy accent (which is actually a Scottish accent but like Americans know the difference) and he’s probably going to get a knighthood before the decade is out. People are going to hate that. I remember he gave the keynote at Law Via the Internet 2012 and a blog commentator called him a “charlatan” as if he was selling snake oil and not just saying “hey maybe we could use computers in the legal world.”

But, anyway yeah… there’s a not insignificant portion of people that hate that fancy book learning. Even people with law degrees and who’d you would think would appreciate careful study of a situation. Source: person with a bunch of degrees that’s lived in “fly over country” her whole life. Also, this:

So I think there’s this meme (used in the cultural studies sense) that innovation is only for dilettantes and academics or fancy institutions that can afford a boutique project. But really all “innovation” is is making something work better, faster, cheaper and more efficiently. It doesn’t require fancy tools or flashy accommodations - it requires patience, study, determination and work.

Its been a few years now, but my application essay to Berkman talked a lot about my affinity for maker culture and experimentation and that it is not born of some innate curiosity or creativity that I possess, but more because I grew up poor and a 45 minute drive from everywhere that I might have bought something so I learned to build my own stuff. That attitude sticks with me in my current professional activities (and why I love the Legal Hackers movement.)

But anyway, and to be fair people are getting better about this, but so much work with expert systems and document automation has occurred in the A2J sphere and it was sort of...ignored in conversations about legal innovation. Like, it doesn’t count if you HAVE to do it to survive. It only matters if it’s done because you want to “push the envelope” and “make lots of money.”

(I believed this is referred to a “crushing it” but I can only code switch so far.)

To get back to where we started, we’re going to all have to find ways to navigate the worst economic environment since maybe the 1930s. I’m hoping people don’t think “oh, we better tighten our belt, time to cut the innovation or emerging tech division/positions” and instead realize “oh wow, we need to expand this work beyond the experimental stage and start implementing these practices organization wide.” Innovation is not a luxury, it needs to be the new standard operating procedure.